Abstract
Recently, international agencies for border security ask for an improvement of the actual Maritime Situational Awareness. This manuscript presents preliminary results of a detection technique of go-fast boats, whose utilization in illegal affairs is strongly increasing. Their detection is very challenging since: (i) their echo is not visible in SAR images, and (ii) the illegal activities are carried out in the nighttime making useless the optical sensors. However, their wakes are very persistent and extent in SAR images for some kilometers. Hence, the manuscript shows an innovative deterministic methodology for the ship detection based on the wake signature. It firstly identifies pixels crossed by the wakes, whose presence is, then, validated in two steps. The first level of validation estimated how prominent the wake components are with respect to their background. The second level of validation exploits the presence of the wakes among neighbor pixels. The approach has been applied on ships imaged by TerraSAR-X mission showing the same peculiarities of go-fast boats. Results highlight the potentialities of the proposed approach, which can be also conceived as a subsequent step in a hybrid system, whose preliminary wake detection screening is carried out by different techniques.
Highlights
The security of the maritime domain is not a given and only an improvement of Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) can guarantee a larger Maritime Security [1]
The manuscript presents preliminary results of a technique that could be used for the detection of go-fast boats when their wakes are observable in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery in favorable weather conditions
A tile is selected around each pixel and the wake components are identified by using the Radon Transform
Summary
The security of the maritime domain is not a given and only an improvement of Maritime Situational Awareness (MSA) can guarantee a larger Maritime Security [1]. This NATO’s statement well pinpoints the principal aim of the MSA, i.e., to reach an effective understanding of any activity associated to the maritime domain, from legal activities, such as fishing, drilling, exploration, or cargo transport, to illegal matters, such as piracy and goods traffic. The non-cooperative systems for maritime surveillance are based on optical/infrared cameras and radar sensors [4]. Thanks to its capability of data acquisition under all weather and day-and-night conditions, the satellite-based radar images, usually gathered by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), are widely exploited
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